Most small business owners lose their week to clerical work that has zero creative content: reconciling QuickBooks against PayPal, scoring which lead to call first, drafting the fifth version of the same reminder email. None of it requires judgment. All of it requires time.
Claude for Small Business is a Cowork plugin that runs that layer for you — 15 workflows built on 15 underlying skills, wired into the tools you already use. Here's the full install, every workflow, and how to make it actually sound like your business instead of a generic template.
1. Install it in 10 minutes
Most of the time here is OAuth flows for whichever connectors you use — the plugin itself is one click.
Get on a paid Claude plan. The plugin runs inside Claude Cowork, which lives in the Claude desktop app: Pro for individuals, Max for heavy use, Team for the whole business. The free tier doesn't run Cowork plugins.
Install the desktop app from claude.com/download, then sign in.
Switch into Cowork mode. The first time you open it, you'll be asked to pick a working folder — something like ~/small-business-cockpit/ — where Claude saves P&L summaries, draft emails, Canva exports, and contract redlines.
Install the plugin. In Cowork, click Customize in the left sidebar, then Plugins, then the + button. Search "Small Business" and install. No restart needed — all 15 workflows load immediately.
Connect only what you actually use. Eight connectors are supported: QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack. The minimum useful setup is one accounting tool, one payment processor, and either email or messaging — that's enough to run every back-office workflow in the next chapter.
Run the setup skill. Type this into the Cowork chat bar:
get me startedThat triggers smb-onboard — an interview about your business, your team, what's hardest right now, and this quarter's priorities. Every other skill reads from those answers. Re-run it any time by saying "update my business context."
2. Money and finance: five workflows that run your back office
This is where the plugin shows its highest leverage — the area where most owners burn the most time on tasks with no creative content. Defaults are QuickBooks and PayPal; point the skills at Stripe, Xero, or FreshBooks during setup if that's your stack.
/plan-payroll — a 30-day cash forecast plus queued invoice reminders, in one document with the forecast on top, the ranked overdue list in the middle, and drafted reminders at the bottom, ready to approve and send.
I'm working on the April 15 payroll. Pull my cash position
from QuickBooks and reconcile it against my PayPal
settlements over the next 30 days. Rank any overdue invoices
that could close the gap and draft a reminder email for each
one in my voice./month-heads-up — spot the tightest week before you hit it. No outbound drafts, just a heads-up.
Look at the next 30 days of cash in QuickBooks. Tell me my
tightest week, what I need to watch, and any expenses I could
defer if it gets close./close-month — reconcile, flag every mismatch with a reason (timing, FX, duplicate, chargeback), and write the P&L narrative your accountant expects to receive.
Close out March for me. Reconcile my QuickBooks transactions
against PayPal settlements, flag anything that doesn't match
with the reason, and write the P&L narrative as a document I
can send straight to my accountant./price-check — a margin-by-product table plus pricing scenarios with break-even math worked out. The skill shows you the numbers; you decide what to charge.
Build me a margin-by-product table for the last 6 months.
Then run three pricing scenarios on my lowest-margin product:
a 5% increase, a 10% increase, and a re-bundle with my
highest-margin add-on. Show me the break-even and the
expected impact on net margin./tax-prep — quarterly estimates formatted for your accountant, or the year-end 1099 list with the threshold check. It doesn't file anything; it produces what your accountant files from.
Get my Q2 2026 estimated taxes ready for my accountant. Pull
income from QuickBooks and PayPal, deduct estimated expenses
based on Q1 patterns, and format the result in the schedule my
accountant uses.Underneath: cash-flow-snapshot, invoice-chase, margin-analyzer, month-end-prep, and tax-season-organizer — callable directly for a narrower slice. The pattern across all five: read the data, do the work, show you the result, wait for approval before anything leaves your computer. The big decisions stay with you; the clerical scaffolding stops being your job.
3. Sales, marketing, and customer ops: seven workflows for the front line
These cover the four most expensive things to get wrong at a small business: which lead to call first, which campaign to run, how to handle a complaint, and what your contracts actually say. Defaults: HubSpot, Gmail, Canva — point elsewhere during setup if needed.
/call-list — scores leads on engagement, fit, and urgency, then writes a one-page call card for the top three to five.
Score the leads in my HubSpot pipeline. Tell me who I should
call first today, and write the call card for the top 5.
Include talking points based on what each lead has engaged
with and the specific question that's still open with them./sales-brief — finds what's selling and drafts a content calendar to push it.
Look at the last 90 days of sales from QuickBooks. Identify
my top 3 sellers and my biggest underperformer. Draft a
content plan for the next 30 days that leans into the top 3,
with a posting calendar and suggested formats for each./run-campaign — finds the slow stretch in revenue, drafts the promo strategy, generates Canva assets, segments the list in HubSpot, and stages the send. Nothing goes out until approved.
Find my weakest revenue month from last year and plan a
promo to address it. Draft the strategy, generate the
campaign assets in Canva, segment my list in HubSpot, and
stage the send. Show me everything before anything goes out./handle-complaint — reads the customer email, pulls order and payment history, and drafts a reply that knows the difference between a first complaint and the third one from the same customer.
A customer just emailed about a late shipment. Look up their
order history in HubSpot and their payment record in PayPal.
Draft a reply in my voice that addresses the specific
situation, not a generic apology./customer-pulse-check — groups feedback across disputes, tickets, email, and reviews into ranked themes with a draft response for each. The artifact most founders never produce: a quarterly view of what customers are actually saying.
Read the last 60 days of customer messages across PayPal
disputes, HubSpot tickets, and my Gmail support inbox. Group
them into themes, rank the themes by how often they come up
and how recent they are, and draft a response template for
each theme./crm-cleanup — finds stale deals, duplicate contacts, and missing fields, shows you before touching anything.
Run a cleanup pass on my HubSpot CRM. Find stale deals that
haven't moved in 30+ days, duplicate contacts, and important
records with missing fields. Show me what you found before
changing anything./review-contract — a plain-English summary, a red-flag list, and a marked-up redline. Doesn't replace your lawyer; gets you to the lawyer with the right questions already framed.
Walk me through this NDA before I sign it. Read the attached
document, give me a plain-English summary, list the clauses
that are unusual or risky, and produce a redline with what I
should ask my lawyer to change.Underneath: lead-triage, content-strategy, canva-creator, ticket-deflector, customer-pulse, crm-maintenance, and contract-review.
4. Business intelligence and hiring: six skills above the day-to-day
The first two chapters run specific tasks. These sit a level up — the artifact you read to know whether the tasks are adding up right.
/monday-brief — cash, sales trend, pipeline movement, and this week's calendar, synthesized into the three things that need attention today.
Build me a Monday morning brief. Pull cash from QuickBooks,
incoming settlements from PayPal, pipeline movement from
HubSpot, and what's on my calendar this week. Tell me the
three things that need my attention today./friday-brief — did the week go where you thought? Shorter, closing-arc focused.
Give me my Friday brief. Compare this week's revenue against
last week, list what sold, flag the wins to keep pushing and
the watches I should not forget by Monday./quarterly-review — the last 90 days of revenue, margin, and customer health as a narrative, board- or advisor-ready in 30 seconds instead of a Sunday afternoon.
Write my Q1 2026 quarterly review. Pull revenue and margin
trends from QuickBooks, customer health from HubSpot, and any
major operational shifts I've recorded. Write it as a
narrative I could send to my advisor, not as a slide deck.business-pulse — the atomic skill underneath all three briefs, callable directly for anything off-cadence: the morning of a board call, the day before a big demo.
Run business-pulse for me right now. I have a board call in 2
hours and need to know: where's cash, what closed this week,
what's stuck in the pipeline, and which customer health
signals have shifted in the last 30 days.job-post-builder — a job post, a scoring-rubric interview guide, and an offer letter template. No connector needed; the inputs are just descriptive.
Help me hire a part-time bookkeeper. The role is 15 hours a
week, fully remote, US-based. Write the job post, build the
interview guide with scoring rubric, and draft the offer
letter template I can adapt.smb-onboard — the setup skill from install, re-runnable any time the business changes.
Update my business context. I just launched a second product
line in the catering category. Re-interview me on what's
changed, and tell me which skills should be updated to
reflect the new context.5. Three combined workflows that change your week
The highest leverage comes from chaining two or three skills in sequence, tied to a fixed moment in your week.
Monday Cockpit — the brief plus the top call cards, as one document.
Run my Monday cockpit.
Step 1: pull my Monday brief. Cash from QuickBooks,
settlements from PayPal, pipeline from HubSpot, calendar from
Google Calendar. Tell me the three things that need my
attention today.
Step 2: after the brief, score the leads in my HubSpot
pipeline and write the call card for the top 3, using
engagement data from the last 7 days, each referencing a
specific item from their history.
Show me both as one document.Cash + Collections Friday — close the week knowing where cash lands in 30 days, with the collection emails already written and staged.
Run my cash and collections close.
Step 1: pull the 30-day cash forecast from QuickBooks and
tell me my tightest upcoming week. Flag what I should watch.
Step 2: identify every overdue invoice, ranked by amount and
lateness. For the top 5, draft a reminder email in my voice,
matched to how that customer has historically responded to
reminders. Stage the drafts — don't send anything.
Show me the forecast, the ranking, and the drafted emails as
one document.Quarterly Pivot — the review, the weak spot it surfaces, and a half-built campaign to address it. The workflow that turns the plugin from back-office automation into something closer to a co-founder.
Run my quarterly pivot.
Step 1: write my quarterly review for the quarter that just
ended. Pull revenue and margin trends from QuickBooks,
customer health from HubSpot, and any operational shifts I've
noted in my context. Write it as a narrative I could send to
my advisor.
Step 2: based on the review, identify the weakest month or
stretch to address in the new quarter. Plan a campaign: draft
the strategy, generate the assets in Canva, segment the
relevant audience in HubSpot, and stage the send.
Show me the review and the campaign plan as one document.6. Customize it so it knows your business
The skills ship with defaults written for a typical small business — which doesn't exist. Customization closes that gap, in three places.
The initial setup interview — already covered in install. The two questions most founders skip and later regret skipping: what's hardest right now, and what are your priorities this quarter. Those answers reshape every downstream output.
The customization prompt, for a deeper rewrite of how the skills behave:
Customize the "smb-complete" plugin for me based on my company.This triggers a fuller interview: industry specifics, team structure, preferred output format (long-form vs bullets, attached docs vs inline tables), fiscal year, currency, regional tax rules, pipeline stage names, product categories. You can also scope it to a single skill:
Customize the handle-complaint skill. My refund policy is
[policy]. My shipping carrier is [carrier] and the typical
resolution time is [time]. From now on, every draft reply
should reflect these facts and offer the right next step
based on the situation.The running update — the most underused path. Every time an output isn't quite right, tell Claude to save the fix as the new default:
This Monday brief is good but I don't care about pipeline
movement, I care about which customers haven't responded in
the last 14 days. Save that as a permanent change to
/monday-brief for me.The reminder emails are too formal. Rewrite them in a more
direct, founder-to-customer voice with less of the "Dear Mr.
Smith" energy, and save that as the new default for
/plan-payroll going forward.This is how the plugin compounds: run a skill, read the output, tell Claude what to change, and the defaults converge to how you actually work.
